{"id":3314,"date":"2019-03-31T21:06:10","date_gmt":"2019-04-01T01:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pangaro.com\/designconversation\/?p=3314"},"modified":"2021-01-18T18:59:40","modified_gmt":"2021-01-18T23:59:40","slug":"computing-conversation-a-lecture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pangaro.com\/designconversation\/2019\/03\/computing-conversation-a-lecture\/","title":{"rendered":"Computing Conversation \u2014 A Lecture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is it possible to ‘compute conversation’? I mean \u2014 is it possible to write heuristics that respond in surprising and stimulating ways, enabling a back-and-forth exchange among intelligent participants?<\/p>\n

Gordon Pask<\/a> not only thought so, he designed and built a series of machines that did so, as far back as 1953. Sure, some of those conversations were simple and his machines could not understand language or listen to speech \u2014 but all the mechanisms he built had memory (and so could learn) and displayed novel, unexpected behaviors (and so kept their co-participants engaged in the interaction). As a result, all of Pask’s machines could hold a form of conversation with humans<\/a> (or sometimes, with other machines!).<\/p>\n

The photo above is a control panel from 1958: Pask’s ‘Eucrates<\/a>‘ environment, where a ‘teacher’ machine attempts to train a ‘pupil’ machine comprising neural nets (yup, neural nets in 1958). There are knobs labelled ‘awareness’ and ‘obstinacy’ \u2014 and don’t miss the wackiest one, ‘oblivesence.’ (Pask was British, so I hold to the definition in British dictionaries: ‘willful forgetfulness.’)<\/p>\n

Wait… what? <\/p>\n

Here’s a view of the entire apparatus:<\/p>\n

\"Image
Gordon Pask’s Eucrates Environment<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Today we have <\/span>extraordinary work<\/a> from architects, artists, and technologists, striving for organic and analog environments that are interactive and immersive. Our world is blanketed with sensors to make an Internet of Things and \u00a0‘smart cities.’<\/a> But where is the actuality of conversation, the dance of intention and action? \u00a0Pask’s clunky, amusing, analog machinery from a half-century ago can be\u00a0<\/span>captivating and mind-blowing<\/a>. If Pask made conversational machines repeatedly as far back as 1953, <\/span>what\u2019s stopping us?<\/i><\/p>\n

In a lecture for the Computational Design Seminar Series<\/a> in the Department of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon on April 9th, I’ll revisit Pask\u2019s journey from building conversational machines to building a theory of conversations, and then explore these questions:<\/p>\n